People, animals and plants all need water, and life tends to thrive near a fresh-water source. This was true in the early days on Walden’s Ridge, known more familiarly today as Signal Mountain.
Fairmount Spring was one of the most important of the year-round springs on the mountain, though today hardly anyone remembers that the spring produced the first community center on the ridge in the 1830s. “The glory of the place and the reason of its being, I suppose, is a chalybeate spring in a woody hollow before the post-office,” wrote Bradford Torrey in “A Week on Walden’s Ridge.”
Near the spring, a “subscription school” was built. The Fairmount Academy, a one-story, frame building with a gable roof capped with a cupola with bell, opened in 1858 and was the first state-authorized public school in Hamilton County. Students attended from the ridge and from as far away as Sale Creek and Tyner and boarded in neighboring homes. Though it closed during the Civil War and Reconstruction, the academy reopened in 1869 and was the gathering place for the populace. Meetings, dances, weddings, funerals, political rallies and elections were held there. The congregation of Fairmount Methodist Church, now Signal Mountain Methodist Church, met at Fairmount Academy until the 1870s. The academy was considered a treasured asset, and the school building was preserved by the Walden’s Ridge Civic League, the Walden’s Ridge Historical Society and others until it burned in July 1946.
A summer community called Summertown developed nearby at another water source, Mabbitt Spring, in what is now Walden. The settlement began to grow in the 1870s as people escaped the heat and diseases — particularly cholera and yellow fever — in Chattanooga. By 1874, a year-round community in Summertown led to the construction of the Oakwood School, located on Anderson Pike close to the current intersection of Taft Highway and Timesville Road.
In the early 1900s and during the Great Depression, when programs became available to modernize schools from frame and log construction, the Fairmount Academy and the Oakwood School merged to form the Fairmount Elementary School, constructed by the Hamilton County Department of Education in 1911. It was situated at Fairmount Pike near Anderson Pike and had no indoor plumbing. The children pulled water from a well and used outhouses.